Building on the foundations of the old gothic/industrial school of Sweden,
as well as on the tradition of fun party music that dates back to
Abba,
Knife (the duo of producer Olof Dreijer and his sister vocalist Karin Dreijer)
conceived two albums of dance music that was not simply upbeat and
retro but also deeply influenced by the zeitgeist of the 2000s:
The Knife (2001), with N.Y. Hotel, and
Deep Cuts (2003), with Heartbeats (their first hit, a close
relative of synth-pop of the 1980s).

Coming after the soundtrack Hannah med H (Rabid, 2003),
Silent Shout (Mute, 2006) emphasized the sinister elements of their
sound. The pulsating Silent Shout
(a mechanic ballet a` la New Order),
the Pet Shop Boys-esque meditation of
Marble House
and One Hit were counterbalanced by a profoundly emotional
undercurrent of angst-laden arrangements and vocals, notably in the
Brian Eno-esque vignette The Captain.
With this album Knife found the unlikely middle point between
German cabaret of the expressionist era and
Dead Can Dance's supernatural pop.
On the downside, the longest songs tend to be the least involving, evidence
of the duo's compositional limits.

Karin Dreijer started the solo project Fever Ray,
that debuted with Fever Ray (Rabid, 2009).
The protagonist is often the rhythmic base. The opener
If I Had A Heart is whispered over a sinister pow-wow pulsation.
A pseudo-gamelan polyrhythm propels the invocation of When I Grow Up.
Lazy synthetic rhythms and male-female harmonies weave a sense of magic in Dry And Dusty.
Ping-pong dance beats permeate Seven, wrapped in atmospheric synth lines.
Triangle Walks evokes Peter Gabriel's bouncy and hummable techno-ethnic ballets.
I'm Not Done is a simple lullabye driven by an industrial polyrhythm
that shifts from waltz to flamenco.
The seven-minute closer, Coconut, returns to the cryptic incantation of
the opener over a fractured equatorial beat.
Peaks of ambience (i.e. production) include the sense of hypnosis that exudes from
Concrete Walls, a song that sounds like it is played in slow motion,
and the sense of loneliness that exudes from
Keep The Streets Empty For Me,
wrapped in mournful drones as if it were a requiem of sorts but enlivened by a
Peruvian flute.
Melody-wise, the stand-out is Now's The Only Time I Know, that unfolds in a catchy crescendo over a sort of futuristic flamenco.
The vocals don't even come close to Bjork's
acrobatic logos but do exhibit some of Sinead O'Connor's
emphatic epos (without the virtuoso detours) and some of
Nico's glacial pathos.
Ironically, the lyrics are as trivial as it gets, mostly devoted to daily life,
so that the album could be viewed as an attempt at crafting a
domestic pop opera.

The transformation of Knife in the sprawling
Shaking The Habitual (Rabid, 2013), which is basically one
long expressionist scream, had few precedents.
There was very little left of their timid dance-pop.
The tribal polyrhythmic stomp A Tooth For An Eye stands as the manifesto
of a formidable quantum leap forward in that genre.
The same concept of absurdist world-music fuels the pseudo-Andean folk dance
of Without You My Life Would Be Boring.
Wrap Your Arms Around Me sounds like a religious ceremony infected by
Dead Can Dance's exotic ancestral gothic.
The zenith of the dancefloor-oriented material comes
with Full Of Fire, whose
unstoppable throbbing robotic pulsation is coupled with a vulnerable whisper,
and whose ten minutes are used for a series of
variations, from the scratching effect of early rap records to echoes of
Trio's anti-anthem Da Da Da.
The lightweight counterpart is Networking, a comic take on Detroit techno.
Vastly inferior is the eleven-minute Stay Out Here, whose atmosphere is reminiscent of the lugubrious British dark dances of the 1980s
(Public Image Ltd and the likes) plus
soul emphasis and Brazilian frenzy.
A completely different side of the duo's new style spreads from
the oneiric nine-minute fantasy of A Cherry On Top, halfway between
kabuki soundtrack and dissonant chamber music,
to the ten-minute spaced-out psychedelic journey of Fracking Fluid Injection via the 19-minute Old Dreams Waiting To Be Realized, that explores
an abstract subliminal noisescape building up to a harrowing climax.
This album catapulted Olof Dreijer to the top tier of post-dance composers
and arrangers.

Plunge (Rabid, 2017),
Fever Ray's first album in nine years, adopts the
hysterical electronic arrangements of
the age of ghetto house and footwork.
Heralded by the jarring machine music of Wanna Sip, the album
specializes in pairing
enchanted melodies with disrespectful accompaniment:
A Part of Us sounds like
Laurie Anderson jamming with
Squarepusher,
and the harsher
Falling sounds like Bjork
duetting with an army of washing machines.
This basic idea yields both wild dancefloor numbers
(the exuberant pseudo-African childish rigmarole IDK About You)
and
catchy sexy exotic vignettes (album's standaout To the Moon and Back,
over a relentless African beat).
She is less convincing when she tries to deliver a message, like in
This Country with its trivial robotic beat and industrial noises.
And Plunge is merely a vintage electronic instrumental like they used
to make at the beginning of the synth era.
The other standout is the atmospheric Red Trails,
another Bjork-esque moment, an operatic violin-driven elegy.